The schizoid personality is one of the most enigmatic structures, often remaining elusive even to experienced psychotherapists. What truly occurs in the inner world of such individuals? What defenses and needs are hidden behind the indifferent façade of the schizoid personality? These questions will be addressed in today’s material.

A brief overview of the key aspects of schizoid personality:

One of the most striking aspects of people with schizoid personalities is their disregard for conventional social expectations.Compliance and conformity go against the grain for schizoid people, whether or not they are in touch with a painful subjective loneliness.

The schizoid self tries to stand at a safe distance from the rest of humanity. Schizoid individuals often exhibit a detached, ironic, and faintly contemptuous attitude.This tendency toward an isolated superiority may have its origins in fending off the incursions of an overcontrolling or overintrusive other. Even in the most seemingly disorganized schizophrenic patients, a kind of deliberate oppositionality has long been noted, as if the patient’s only way of preserving a sense of self-integrity is in making a farce of every conventional expectation.

Temperament of the Schizoid Personality:

Clinical experience suggests that temperamentally, the person who becomes schizoid is hyperreactive and easily overstimulated. 

Schizoid people often describe themselves as innately sensitive, and their relatives frequently mention their having been the kind of baby who shrinks from too much light or noise or motion. It is as if the nerve endings of schizoid individuals are closer to the surface than those of the rest of us. Although most infants cuddle, cling, and mold themselves to the body of a warm caregiver, some newborns stiffen or pull back as if the adult has intruded on their comfort and safety. One suspects that such babies are constitutionally prone to schizoid personality structure, especially if there is a “poor fit”  between themselves and their main caregivers.

Drive of the Schizoid Personality:

In the area of drive as classically understood, the schizoid person seems to struggle with oral level issues. Specifically, he or she is preoccupied with avoiding the dangers of being engulfed, absorbed, distorted, taken over, eaten up. 

The outer world feels full of consuming, distorting threats against security and individuality. 

Manifestation of Aggression in the Schizoid Personality:

Schizoid people do not impress one as being highly aggressive, despite the violent content of some of their fantasies. Their families and friends often regard them as unusually gentle, placid people. 

Affective Sphere of the Schizoid Personality:

One of the most striking aspects of many high-functioning individuals with schizoid dynamics is their lack of common defenses. They tend to be in touch with many emotional reactions at a level of genuineness that awes and even intimidates their acquaintances.

It is common for the schizoid person to wonder how everybody else can be lying to themselves so effortlessly when the harsh facts of life are so patent.Part of the alienation from which schizoid people suffer derives from their experiences of not having their own emotional, intuitive, and sensory capacities validated—because others simply do not see what they do.

Schizoid people do not seem to struggle quite the way narcissistic people do with shame or introjectively depressive people do with guilt. They tend to take themselves and the world pretty much as is without the internal impetus to make things different or to shrink from judgment. Yet they may suffer considerable anxiety about basic safety. When they feel overwhelmed, they hide—either literally with a hermit’s reclusiveness or by retreat into their imagination.

Defensive and Adaptive Mechanisms of the Schizoid Personality:

The pathognomonic defense in schizoid personality organization is withdrawal into an internal world of imagination. In addition, schizoid people may use projection and introjection, idealization, devaluation, and to a lesser extent, the other defenses that have their origins in a time before self and other were fully differentiated psychologically.

Among the more “mature” defenses, intellectualization seems to be the preference of most schizoid people. They rarely rely on mechanisms that blot out affective and sensory information, such as denial and repression; similarly, the defensive operations that organize experience along good-and-bad lines, such as compartmentalization, moralization, undoing, reaction formation, and turning against the self, are not prominent in their repertoires.

Under stress, schizoid individuals may withdraw from their own affect as well as from external stimulation, appearing blunted, flat, or inappropriate, often despite showing evidence of heightened attunement to affective messages coming from others.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

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